Bruce Sterling, techno-prophet of the Wired school, was recently in London prophesying the future of RFID technology. Seeing beyond its crucial role in managing the logistics of commodity flows within just-in-time production, Sterling imagines RFID’s ability to provide a design fix for our ailing planet. Anthony Alexander reports on his latest version of a ‘don’t look back’ populist and market oriented environmentalism

Agnese Trocchi looks at the history of pirate television in Italy and sees the rise of a new organisation in the TeleStreet network

Users of Andy Deck’s Glyphiti applet are invited to engage in the collaborative editing of a mural, composed of 256 icon sized images (glyphs) by working on one 32 x 32 pixel section at a time. Black and white, zoomed in tight, Glyphiti feels like the dysfunctional amalgamation of familiar interface features from antiquated image editing software.

Don’t let the apparently contradictory stance of ‘Big Blue’ IBM supporting technologically ‘radical’ open source confuse you. While you’re keeping your eye on the operating systems ball, in the land of hardware and patents, business goes on as usual. Felix Stalder reports on the challenges ahead.

When we told Tiziana Terranova about our sustainable publishing diagram (Mute19), she asked whether we’d heard of the the 1975 ‘onNLine System’. Here, she explains why today’s knowledge management systems are yesterday’s news. On the right, a visual parallel she sent us: O’Reilly’s Linux work model.

A California based corporation running the Internet’S Domain Name System in the interests of the US Department of Commerce. Sound unbelievable? Think again...

They said Linux would never challenge Microsoft, and they’ll probably say that OpenCores will never challenge proprietary hardware companies. But that’s not going to stop them trying. This open-source hardware group aims to develop a library of free hardware designs for standard components – including processors, memory controllers, peripherals and motherboards, providing a set of publicly shared templates for producing computers. Right now, they’re working to create a OpenRISC processor with system-on-a-chip capabilities.

Anthony Auerbach on Hexstatic’s collaboration with Coldcut